The Remembrancer's Map

About this book

Verity Ansell catalogues what London throws away. A reclusive archivist with a burn-scarred hand she can't explain, she spends her days among rate books and parish registers, and her nights walking a city she loves more than any person. Then an anomalous accession crosses her desk: photographs of Marrow Lane, a street demolished in 1962 — with a modern car parked at its kerb. One fog-thick night, Verity finds the lane. Gaslit, inhabited, impossible. Beneath the pavements of the modern capital, London's erased places are still standing — and they remember. When podcaster Naomi Okoye arrives with proof that her brother, who vanished from Brixton last month, appears by name and face in the census of 1891, Verity is pulled into a mystery threading the Thames, sealed Underground platforms and streets that officially never existed. Someone is editing London. And London has started editing back.